Michele Bachmann Values Voter Summit speech transcript (full text)

Transcript of Rep. Michele Bachmann's speech as prepared by Federal News Service and provided by Family Research Council with permission to re-publish:

REPRESENTATIVE MICHELE BACHMANN (R-MN): Hi, everyone. It’s good to see you! Thank you so much. God bless you. What a wonderful morning. (Applause.)

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Thank you so much. Good morning!

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Good morning!

REP. BACHMANN: Thank you for that warm introduction. It’s always an honor and a thrill to be back at the Values Voters Summit. I want to thank Tony Perkins, the great people at FRC.

And before I start, I just want to say a word about this concept that you’ve heard about called the war on women, the so-called war on women. And I just want to say I think it has about as much reliability and truthfulness as Bill Clinton’s arithmetic. (Applause.)

But this week, as we have seen to our horror, there is a very real war that is going on across the world, and that’s what I want to take my few moments together that we have this morning. I sit on the Intelligence Committee. We deal with the nation’s classified secrets. And this is a very real issue.

And as we survey the political landscape today, it feels like it’s déjà vu all over again because we’re seeing struggles all across the Middle East and we’re seeing a tax on our embassies in a way that we saw in the late 1970s. Staggering unemployment. High gas prices. A struggling economy. You’d almost think Jimmy Carter’s back in the White House again, wouldn’t you ? Only what we see is we are again desperate for another Ronald Reagan.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes! (Applause.)

REP. BACHMANN: This time, I’m sorry to say, it’s even worse because the fires of radical Islamic traditionalism are not just limited to one country. They’re currently raging all across Africa and all across Asia. Each week our Christian brothers and sisters from Nigeria to Kenya are being persecuted. When they go to church, they don’t even know if they’ll make it home afterwards.

And now the violence has come to us, the United States. And on the anniversary of 9/11, no less, our Libyan ambassador and his courageous embassy staff lost their lives in Benghazi and Libya in a cruel, cold-blooded, gruesome, intentional terror attack. And all the while, the response of this administration has communicated both weakness and lack of resolve to the world. (Applause.)

And a top official seemed, incredulously, apparently convinced that the only way to curtail this crisis is to put a full, frontal attack on the free speech rights of American citizens. I want to be perfectly clear: this isn’t just about a movie. This was an intentional act that was done by radical Islamists who seek to impose their set of beliefs on the rest of the world, and we will not stand for it! (Cheers, applause.)